The Processing Foundation published “Piloting the p5.js Shared Responsibility Committee” on 22 October 2026, reporting on the first year of a governance experiment that began in September 2025.
It is the natural companion to the Maintenance Fund we covered yesterday. That piece was about the money — $200,000 annually in perpetuity, split evenly between Processing Java and p5.js. This is about who decides what happens to the p5.js share.
What the committee is
In the Foundation’s words, the Shared Responsibility Committee (SRC) is:
a joint decision-making body made up of Processing Foundation staff and members of the p5.js contributor community
It decides by deliberation and consensus, and publishes its decisions as a public record. Its stated purpose is “to collectively manage shared resources via the Processing Foundation Maintenance Fund,” with a core commitment to increasing access to p5.js.
The five founding members, all serving since 16 September 2025:
- Kit Kuksenok — chairperson
- Amy B. Woodman — Foundation team
- Xin Xin — Foundation team
- Dave Pagurek — community
- Kenneth Lim — community
Computational Mama and Emily Lovell joined as community members on 19 October 2026, taking it to seven. The post does not explain how members are selected, which is the most obvious open question about a body of this kind.
What it actually did
During the pilot year — September 2025 to September 2026 — the SRC decided how $14,700 should support the people who build, maintain, document, teach with and improve p5.js. Of that, $9,500 came from the 2025 Generative Art Foundation Grant.
It also nominated contributors as Open Source Software Micrograntees and Developers in Residence, directing resources toward accessibility, v2 documentation, and maintenance.
Then, as of September 2026, the Foundation established the Maintenance Fund, which provides the SRC with a recurring annual grant of $100,000 plus community donations. That is the p5.js half of the $200,000 figure, and the arithmetic is consistent across both announcements.
So the trajectory is: a committee spends $14,700 for a year as a pilot, demonstrates it can, and then gets handed a recurring $100,000.
Why this is more interesting than it sounds
Open-source funding announcements are common. Open-source governance announcements with named members, a consensus requirement and a public decision record are not.
The normal failure mode of a well-funded open-source project is that money arrives and the decisions about it stay inside the organisation that received it, because that is administratively simpler and legally safer. Contributors then discover the allocation after the fact and have no mechanism to influence it. The second normal failure mode is the opposite: a fully open process that cannot reach a decision.
Putting two Foundation staff and two community members on a body chaired by a fifth person, requiring consensus rather than a vote, and committing to publish the outcomes is an attempt to sit between those. Whether it works is an empirical question, and the Foundation is appropriately unwilling to claim it has been settled:
still an experiment, and its processes will continue to evolve
The scale matters here too. $100,000 a year is small against the labour that maintains a library with p5.js’s reach, and the Foundation said as much yesterday — the $200,000 covers roughly 60% of the Project Leads’ compensation and only the minimum maintenance needs. A committee allocating a sum that modest cannot resolve the underlying problem that creative-coding infrastructure is maintained substantially by unpaid people. What it can do is make the allocation legible, and legible allocation is how a project recruits the next cohort of maintainers rather than burning the current one.
The part worth copying
The public decision record is the transferable idea. Most projects that try shared governance stall on the question of accountability: if a committee decides by consensus behind closed doors, it is indistinguishable from a staff decision with extra steps.
Publishing the decisions converts the committee from a consultation exercise into something contributors can audit, cite and argue with. For any project wondering how to share control of a funding pool without handing it to a vote, this is a documented, year-tested arrangement with named participants and real numbers attached — which is considerably more than most governance proposals come with.
Sources
- Piloting the p5.js Shared Responsibility Committee — Processing Foundation
- Announcing the Processing Foundation Maintenance Fund — Processing Foundation
- Processing Foundation